by Conrad Black
Tet was Lyndon Johnson’s passport to another term as president, but instead, he crumbled. He could not persuade the country that Tet had not been a disaster but actually a great victory. The country lost hope, the media eroded, and the world’s greatest power, mighty and courageous, wallowed in the ignominy of strategic error, compounded by a puritanical incompetence at improvisation afflicting its senior leadership. CBS chief news reader and former war correspondent Walter Cronkite, with his bedside manner like a country doctor and a luxuriant mustache that comforted the nation as Marshal Pétain’s had the French, walked through the dining room of the Majestic Hotel in Saigon in army helmet and fatigues, and announced to the country that he had lost hope in the war.
In the New Hampshire primary, where Johnson had allowed a stand-in, Senator Thomas McIntyre, to be in his place on the ballot, in what was another considerable victory, Johnson won 49 to 41 for the antiwar challenger, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, an eccentric but intelligent and witty campaigner who had been barnstorming the state for months. Four days later, Robert Kennedy, who had been hanging back, aware of the practical impossibility of defeating an incumbent president for the nomination, felt shamed by McCarthy’s performance into jumping off the shelf. From Portland, Oregon, where he was campaigning, Richard Nixon watched Robert Kennedy’s candidacy announcement and, prophetically, said to an aide: “Very terrible forces have been unleashed. Something bad is going to come of this. God knows where this is going to lead.”198 Kennedy claimed to be entering the fray lest “America lose the moral leadership of this planet.” America’s claim to holding this leadership had become quite threadbare already, and would continue to shrink.
Westmoreland took the occasion to ask for 206,000 more soldiers, and he could not have been unaware that any such further infusion was completely out of the question. Westmoreland was kicked upstairs to army chief of staff and replaced by a very talented tank general and protégé of General George S. Patton, General Creighton W. Abrams. On March 31, 1968, President Johnson addressed the nation, announced a bombing pause over the North, invited the enemy to peace talks, and concluded: “There is division in the American house now.... I will not seek, and I shall not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” The president of the United States had been chased from office by a ragged little Vietnamese communist, a goateed former salad-mixer for Escoffier.
6. THE 1968 ELECTION
It was a terrible year for America, and it would get much worse. But it must be remembered that at one time or another, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy. Hubert Humphrey, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon were all running for president, as well as secondary people such as McCarthy, George Romney, and Alabama governor George Wallace. There probably has never been such a profusion of distinguished candidates; beleaguered and divided though the country was, its moral leadership open to much question, the United States still commanded the almost unlimited attention of a world addicted to its spectacles, even more than in Jefferson’s time, and no less for their often very violent quality. The civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis; he was 39. King had had the genius to forgo violence and appeal exclusively to the innate and decent knowledge of most American whites that it was immoral to treat African Americans as an inferior species, and that it made a complete mockery of the constitutional ideals that continued to be bandied about as the light unto the world in matters of civil rights and human dignity. White America obviously possessed the ability to crush the African Americans but not the moral disposition to do so when they were only fellow citizens nonviolently seeking what had been promised to them more than a century before after a terrible and cathartic war.
Just two months later, the same fate befell Robert Kennedy, in Los Angeles, at the end of his victorious primary campaign in California (a primary in which the incumbent governor, Ronald Reagan, ran ahead of all other candidates combined in both parties, although Nixon and Rockefeller were only write-in candidates). King remains one of the great black leaders of all times and places; Robert Kennedy is an enigma. To his enemies, he was too much like his authoritarian and unscrupulous father, and was too comfortable with Joe McCarthy, and too quick to tap Martin Luther King’s telephone and audit Richard Nixon’s mother’s taxes. His choirboy and family-man pieties did not sit well with his endless womanizing, and it was never clear to what extent the grace of his conversion on Vietnam was a conscientious change of mind or just rank opportunism. Yet, he was a courageous, patriotic, and idealistic man, and in this terrible year 1968, millions of Americans identified with him and will always look back on his brief and tragic campaign as one of the defining moments of their lives.
While this violent election campaign unfolded in the United States, in France the Gaullist regime, celebrating its 10th anniversary, was suddenly overwhelmed by student demonstrations and a general strike. De Gaulle was on one of his state visits (to Romania), urging the locals to revolt from the yoke they were under and take their lead from the disinterested font of civilization led by himself (it was essentially the same message, from Bucharest to Phnom Penh to Rio de Janeiro to Montreal). The original issue was overcrowding of campuses, and then in the unique foible of the French that requires them every so often to interrupt their splendidly comfortable and stylish lives to tear up paving stones and hurl them at the police, the country indulged more and more radical provocateurs until black and white flags were everywhere and people were screaming insanities and were being cheered to the rafters, “even unto Notre Dame” (as Napoleon, who well knew, and exploited the trait, said). There was great suspense, as de Gaulle had made France perhaps the world’s third most influential country, with a delicate world power balance between the Soviet Union and an America so distracted and mired in Vietnam, and undergoing the pains of long-repressed racial frictions. The Communists held about 20 percent of the French votes and were very active in the anti-Gaullist activities, and tiresome though de Gaulle was to those he targeted, especially the English-speaking countries, he was generally reliable in the severest crises and his resurrection of France as a powerful state was a great benefit to the West. Its disintegration now would be a far more serious setback than anything that might happen in Indochina.
In one of the last great triumphs of his tumultuous career, which spanned three French republics as well as interim regimes, he waited until he judged that the ancient French spirit of avarice would cause the bourgeoisie to grasp that these riotous shenanigans might actually cost them something, and then he ostentatiously flew to visit the commander of the main French army, on the Rhine, the loyal Gaullist paratroop general and victorious veteran of the Battle of Algiers, Jacques Massu, assured himself of the loyalty of the notoriously heavyhanded (when it intervened in civil affairs) French army, and returned to Paris to make a five-minute speech, on May 30, 1968. It was audio-only on the strike-bound national ORTF network, with just a still picture of the president of the Republic on the television screens of the nation. He began: “As the sole legitimate repository of national and republican power, I have, in the last 24 hours, considered every means—I repeat, every means—for the conservation of that power.” He dissolved the National Assembly for new elections, which would be held on the normal timetable unless what he called the forces of “totalitarian communism” proposed to “prevent the people from expressing themselves, as they have prevented the students from studying, the teachers from teaching, and the workers from working.” He explicitly threatened, in that eventuality, rule by personal decree, which the Constitution (which he effectively wrote) authorized, and imposition of martial law by the army, well accustomed to imposing it in less genteel places, such as North Africa. The opposition collapsed. There was no possible resistance to de Gaulle’s promise of free elections fairly facilitated by overwhelming force, all in conformity with a constitution almost 90 percent of the public approved less than a decade before. Where 500,000 people marched dow
n the Champs-Elysées demanding that de Gaulle go, on the morning of May 30, 750,000 marched back up the boulevard in the early evening, demanding that he remain (doubtless scores of thousands were in both marches). This was a decisive defeat for the international left.
The Republicans met in Miami in early August and nominated Richard Nixon for president over Rockefeller and Reagan, and the somewhat reactionary governor of Maryland, Spiro Agnew, for vice president, as Alabama governor George C. Wallace was running as an arch-segregationist independent candidate, and Nixon had to hold some of the South and border states to win. The Democrats met in Chicago in August in a riot-torn convention, where the New Left exploited the reactionary stupidity of the mighty Richard Daley political machine, which ruled the city with an iron fist, with provoking and outrageous demonstrations without permits and endless goading and taunting of the police. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated safely enough over McCarthy (in the absence of the two leading candidates, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy). Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine (a Roman Catholic) was chosen for vice president.
As the Chicago drama was unfolding before the astonished eyes of a world that had no idea what surprises, grim or diverting, would emerge from the boiling cauldron of America from one week to the next, the Soviet Union and some of its compliant satellites abruptly invaded the Czech region of Czechoslovakia (Bohemia), all along its borders with Iron Curtain countries, and by a long succession of giant transport planes, disgorging thousands of Soviet troops at Prague Airport on August 21. It was done much more professionally and less violently than the precedents in Warsaw, East Berlin, and Budapest, and the reform leader, Alexander Dubcek, was removed from office but not physically abused. There wasn’t much other powers could do about it, but it was, in strictly opportunistic terms, a welcome leitmotif for the United States after all the horrors of Vietnam, racial disturbances, and assassinations and political violence that had beset that country.
Nixon had a heavy lead at the start of the election campaign, but Humphrey ran a plucky race and gradually the antiwar left rallied to him, while the Johnson Democrats, led by the president himself, stuck with Humphrey out of loyalty. As the race narrowed in the polls, the third-party vote for Wallace began to diminish, as third-party votes in the U.S. usually do. With the election very close coming into the last week, Johnson and Nixon, two of the toughest and least scrupulous political leaders in the country’s history, resorted to new levels of electoral skullduggery Nixon throughout the campaign had largely dodged the Vietnam issue by saying, “I have a plan,” often patting his suit breast pocket as if it held the plan, and purporting to observe a moratorium on political discussion of Vietnam because the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had followed the advice of the Russians and were “negotiating” in Paris with the Americans. In fact, they were just arguing about the shape of a table, as the South Vietnamese refused to negotiate with the Viet Cong.
Nixon assumed all through the campaign that Johnson would try to pull it out for Humphrey by fabricating some peace breakthrough at the end. And some officials of the Nixon campaign, especially Anna Chennault, the widow of Chiang Kai-shek’s friend and commander of the Flying Tigers air support group in China during the war, were friendly with the South Vietnamese ambassador in Washington and with President Thieu himself.199 Johnson was tapping the telephones of the embassy of his South Vietnamese ally, as well as of Nixon and his senior campaign officials, and even of his own vice president and his party’s candidate, Humphrey. He was trying to get evidence of someone illegally conducting foreign policy (the Logan Act), but the Republicans steered clear of that.
Finally, on October 30, just six days before the election, time ran out and Johnson went on television to announce the long-awaited, providentially timed, and completely spurious breakthrough. Thieu had consistently refused to attend any such talks and didn’t need Nixon to tell him that his government had a better chance with the Republicans than the Democrats. So Johnson said that the North Vietnamese had agreed to respect the DMZ (not a huge concession, since almost all their supplies came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos or through the port of Sihanoukville and the jungles of Cambodia anyway), and that they would not attack South Vietnamese cities. Johnson delicately said that the Viet Cong and South Vietnamese were “free” to attend.
Thieu cracked this farce wide open on November 2 by stating that he would not be a party to such an attempted sellout. Nixon announced yet another “personal moratorium” on Vietnam campaigning but had his campaign co-manager, the lieutenant governor of California, Robert Finch, issue a statement that he was “surprised” that Thieu was not in place—i.e., that it was just an election stunt. Nixon interrupted his personal moratorium on November 3 to say that he personally didn’t question Johnson’s good faith, but that Finch had every right to consider the president’s action a political trumpery if he wished. Johnson took to referring to Finch as “Fink,” as if he didn’t know what his name was, and on election eve, as Nixon and Humphrey were on competing nationwide telethons, Nixon referred to the latest intelligence showing increased North Vietnamese infiltration (a complete falsehood). There were no serious voting irregularities, unlike 1960, when Kennedy probably stole the election, or 1876, when Hayes certainly did when a deadlock was broken by a congressional commission. But in electoral mores, Johnson, on behalf of the unoffending Humphrey, and Nixon, had scraped the barrel. In a tragic time, with 400 conscripted servicemen dying every week and violence all over the country, the sacred privilege of the ballot was exercised at the end of a spectacularly reprehensible effort to manipulate the election. Johnson had been more egregious than Nixon, and Nixon’s desire not to be robbed again is understandable, but it was an outrageous burlesque of popular consultation. Nixon won, 31.77 million votes to 31.27 million for Humphrey and 9.9 million for Wallace, or 43.4 percent to 42.7 percent to 13.5 percent, and 391 electoral votes to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for Wallace.
7. PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON
The transition was cordial and Johnson returned to his ranch under, as he called them, “the tattered skies of Texas.” He had been vital to the 1960 election, directed the space program well, and rendered great and irreplaceable service to the amelioration of racial justice and relations. Some of his social programs were beneficial, and the scale of them was noble in intention. He had little idea of the subtleties of foreign policy and no concept of what he was getting into in Indochina, nor of how to build necessary domestic and foreign support for a war and sustain it, nor of how to conduct it. When he virtually won at Tet, he despaired, lost all faith in the military command, and gave up his war and his office: a gigantic, tragic, important, and, at his best, outstanding president. He had been one of Washington’s greatest figures for 30 years.
Richard Nixon was the first president to be elected to office without his party in control of either house of Congress since Zachary Taylor in 1848. He inherited a nation in turmoil in a world of immense complexity. He chose the former (Eisenhower administration) attorney general, William P. Rogers, as secretary of state, but he detested the foreign service and considered Rogers a friendly placeman who would keep things quiet while he reoriented foreign policy. By far the most important of his appointments was of Harvard professor and German refugee from the pogroms of the Third Reich, Henry A. Kissinger, as national security advisor, succeeding McGeorge Bundy and Walt W. Rostow. Nixon and Kissinger’s association would be one of the most remarkable and fruitful in the history of American government.
There were antiwar protesters throwing garbage at the new president’s car as he went to the inaugural parade reviewing stand, to which Nixon and his wife responded by opening the roof of the car and standing to acknowledge the crowds, a widely appreciated gesture. While he was still reviewing the parade, Kissinger arrived with some executive orders for Rogers to sign, drafted by him and Nixon, effectively assuring that the national security advisor would see all policy matters and could require material from the St
ate and Defense departments.
Though no one except Nixon and Kissinger knew it, this was a massive reshaping of the conduct of foreign policy. The times were so contentious, and Nixon himself such a controversial figure, because he had ridden the relatively sober aspects of the Red Scare to high office and manipulated himself from there into national office, and had been left by Eisenhower to do the dirty work for the administration politically, Nixon could not count on much slack from the Democrats. And that party, having led America into Vietnam, was now dominated by those who wished to be rid of it at any price. Nixon would have only the shortest interval before traditional post-electoral amnesia would take over and leave it as his war.
